AEA survey followup. Sublime Text

I posted my answers to a questionnaire about my favorite coding tools.

You said the most essential tool to your coding is Sublime Text. What makes it so indispensable?

Sublime Text has a good selection of plugins, extensions and visual themes. It took a while for me to learn how to customize it. Great resources, like Josh Earl’s book Sublime Productivity helped my learning curve. With each trick and with every customization Sublime Text became more indispensable.

What other tools did you try or use before switching over?

I’ve been working on websites for a while and worked on Windows before switching to Mac. I was a fan of Allaire’s Homesite. I used it for years on my PC as watched it change owners to Macromedia and then Adobe. It had a good run for ten years from 1999-2009. After I switched to Mac I used BBEdit, Coda and most recently Atom and Sublime.

What did they lack?

In 2013, I started using git and switched to Atom after its release. Atom’s interface use of green and orange is simple but helped my git learning curve. That was a big reason I switched. I like Atom and Sublime but settled on Sublime Text because of its speed and stability.

What would you say is your second-most essential coding tool?

That’s gotta be git. It has become indispensable to how I build websites today.